DALLAS — A fraction of a second stands out from all the other notable experiences in Jim Leavelle’s long, notable life.

He was among the first sailors at Pearl Harbor to see Japanese Zeros attacking the U.S. fleet. He was a Dallas detective who solved all but two of the multitude of cases he handled. (He was pretty sure what happened in the two unsolved ones.)

But on Nov. 24, 1963, he was the cowboy-hatted man in the light-colored suit handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald as Jack Ruby fired his fatal shot on live TV, two days after Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. The moment of the Oswald shooting became one of the most recognizable images of the 20th century.

Leavelle, who already knew Dallas nightclub owner Ruby before the shooting, died Thursday, his daughter Karla Leavelle confirmed. He was 99.

Both Pearl Harbor and Oswald’s shooting were imprinted in Leavelle’s mind.

“It’s kind of like a camera. Once you took it in, you never got rid of it,” he said in 2014.

Oswald’s shooting wasn’t an incident he discussed easily in its aftermath. For Leavelle and others linked to the events that colored national perceptions of Dallas, it was years before they felt comfortable opening up.

“Particularly as he got older, he felt an obligation to tell what he knew, to dispel the conspiracy theories,” said daughter Tanya Evers of San Antonio. “He felt like he had a responsibility.”

Just last week, Leavelle celebrated his 99th birthday in Dallas with about 50 friends.

“We have a photo of him blowing out all 99 candles,” Karla Leavelle said.

She and Evers remember Leavelle as a devoted father who believed in discipline and conviction, and as a compassionate and loyal man who maintained lifelong friendships.

“If you became his friend, you were his friend forever,” Evers said.

Among those friends was a radio newsman who had reported on the shooting; he and Leavelle regularly visited each other even after the reporter moved to south Texas. Another was a woman who had been in middle school when she wrote a letter to Leavelle, seeking information about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath.

“He wrote her back, and they’d been corresponding ever since,” Evers said. “Now she’s grown with two kids of her own, and I don’t know if he influenced her, but she’s in law enforcement in west Texas. That’s the kind of guy he was.”

Born in rural Red River County, Texas, Leavelle seemed destined to live an exciting life. A high school classmate predicted in the 1939 yearbook that Leavelle would become a big-city detective.

“I don’t know how the others fared, but he hit me right on the head,” Leavelle said.

He joined the Navy immediately after graduating from high school. On Dec. 7, 1941, Leavelle was on the deck of the Whitney, a destroyer tender, about 2 miles from Pearl Harbor. He was talking to a boatswain’s mate when the officer spotted the enemy planes attacking Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor.

After the air attacks ended, the sailors were on edge about a possible land invasion.

“It kept us on our toes for the rest of that day and night,” he said.

After the war, Leavelle went to Dallas, where he worked a number of jobs before he became a police officer in April 1950.

Leavelle was a patrolman when he met Ruby at his dance hall on South Ervay Street. At the time, officers were often assigned to shake down beer joints near closing time to check for rowdy customers who might create disturbances.

Leavelle had given an oral history to the John F. Kennedy museum, the Sixth Floor Museum, in which he recalled that Ruby made a prophetic comment during one such shakedown.

“He told me, ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to see two police officers in a death struggle with somebody about to lose their life, and I could jump in and save them,’” Leavelle said.

The morning after Oswald was shot, Leavelle recalled Ruby’s statement about wanting to be a hero.

“I told him, ‘You know, you didn’t do us any favor by shooting Oswald,’” Leavelle said. “He said, ‘All I wanted to do was to be a hero, and it looks like all I did was foul things up.’

On Nov. 22, 1963, Leavelle had been assigned to be available in case something came up, he said in the 2002 oral history for the Sixth Floor Museum.

That morning, an armed robbery suspect he was after was spotted in North Dallas. Leavelle and a patrolman arrested the man and took the suspect to the city jail. Kennedy’s motorcade was nearly through downtown Dallas when Leavelle arrived at the jail, where he learned the president had been shot.

He went to the Texas School Book Depository, where other detectives were investigating the crime scene. Leavelle organized other officers to take witness statements.

Leavelle then learned an officer had been shot in Oak Cliff. He arrived at the scene after Officer J.D. Tippit’s body had been removed.

“They called me on the air to tell me that they had arrested a suspect at the Texas Theatre,” Leavelle said in his Sixth Floor history. Leavelle had the arresting officers take the suspect to his office. Oswald was alone in an interrogation room when Leavelle arrived downtown.

“I sat down and started talking to him strictly about the shooting of Tippit,” Leavelle said in his oral history. At the time, he said, “I had no clue that he was going to be the suspect in the presidential assassination. That was the farthest thing from my mind.”

Leavelle was handcuffed to Oswald for the Sunday morning transfer from City Hall to the county jail.

Leavelle thought someone might try to shoot Oswald once they left City Hall. As the transfer car was being maneuvered into the basement, Leavelle caught Ruby and his gun in his peripheral vision.

“I tried to pull (Oswald) behind me, but all I succeeded in doing was turning his body, so that instead of hitting him dead center, it hit him just about 4 inches to the left of the navel,” Leavelle said.

“From the time that I saw him in the center of that driveway to the time he pulled the trigger on that .38 pistol that he had, it took just a little over one second.”

Leavelle retired in 1975 but was often sought for interviews about his role in history. But he deferred to his granddaughter, Kate Griendling, when it came to granting access for a documentary about the assassination’s 50th anniversary.

“He had plenty of other offers,” said Griendling, a filmmaker who had enjoyed a close relationship with her grandfather. “He’s the reason people spoke to me who had never spoken to the press.”

That documentary, “Capturing Oswald,” premiered in 2013.

On Sunday, Griendling recorded her last interview with her grandfather.

“It was really important for him to emphasize that what mattered most to him were the times that he helped people,” she said. For instance, the time that he was called to a store where a woman had been caught shoplifting toys for her kids; he ended up buying them gifts for the holidays.

“I just feel really lucky,” Griendling said, “because a lot of people loved my grandpa. But I feel fortunate to have known him in a way that had nothing to do with JFK.”

Leavelle’s wife, Taimi Sneima Leavelle, died in 2014.

In addition to his two daughters, Leavelle is survived by Griendling, two other grandchildren and a great-grandson. Services are pending and are expected to be in Dallas.